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Climate Change and the Integrity of Science
blau tips news of an open letter from 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel laureates, decrying the "recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular." The letter lays out the basics of the scientific method, and explains how certainly highly-regarded theories — such as the big bang, evolution, and Earth's origin — are commonly accepted due to the strength of the evidence supporting them, though "fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong." It goes on to "call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them." According to the Guardian, the letter "originated with a number of NAS members who were frustrated at the misinformation being spread by climate deniers and the assaults on scientists by some policy-makers who hope to delay or avoid making policy decisions and are hiding behind the recent controversy around emails and minor errors in the IPCC."
*ALL* science is about predicting the future. If you have a theory that cannot make predictions, then it's not a scientific theory, it's not right, it's not even wrong .
climate deniers
Wow, is that what they're called?
A skeptic is someone who is dubious of a claim, but is willing to be persuaded by sufficient evidence. A denier is someone who will never be persuaded by any amount of evidence. There's precious little skepticism with regards to climate change these days, because the evidence is sufficient to convince those who were initially skeptical, but there's a hell of a lot of denial. If people who still refuse to accept the evidence don't want to be called "deniers," then you're welcome to come up with a different word -- but you can't have "skeptic," because that word already means something different.
And you can take your Godwin and stuff it. Godwin's Law is invoked when someone brings Hitler or the Holocaust into the conversation where they don't belong. So far, the only people doing that in this conversation are the climate change deniers. You don't get to, er, deny other people the use of the word "denier" just because it's often used with the word "Holocaust" in front of it. The verb "to deny" is a perfectly good English word going back to the 1300s, and it can be used in reference to many, many things that have nothing to do with the period from 1933 to 1945. In this particular case, the label fits: deal with it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
In the academic arena ripping each others ideas to shreds is standard fare. No one is suggesting Lomborg committed fraud or going after him personally. People are suggesting he is wrong. Given that many of his more outlandish claims appear in paperback rather than in peer reviewed literature this is better than he deserves.
Sorry, but somebody has been lying to you. The raw, unadjusted data is owned by various national meteorological services, and it has not been destroyed. Some of it is available for a fee, but quite a bit is available freely. You can find it here
Certainly. Such a comparison may be seen here
Over 10% in such a short period of time? That's pretty impressive. Of course, virtually every major scientific society in the world has previously come out in support of climate science and concerns about global warming
It then goes on to talk about the recent "americans are bombarded with cancer" report:
(Agreement with or refutation of the specifics of the case being made are left as an exercise to the reader.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Alright.... let me start with your corollaries.
The temperature of the earth is warming over time.
Correct. Specifically, the global average is going up over at least annual periods, and generally decadal periods.
The amount of this warming is unprecedented.
Incorrect. How warm it has been in the past is irrelevant to whether the earth is getting warmer right now. That's only a data collection issue, not a theory issue.
The warming will continue past the point where the earth's feedback mechanisms can correct it.
Not quite. The concern is that the warming will continue past the point where short-term feedback mechanisms can correct it - things like seasonal rainfalls, ocean currents, etc. Politicians specifically are only marginally interested in whether there's a 50000 year cycle that can correct the current temperature increase.
The warming will cause catastrophic impacts to life on earth, particularly humans.
Define catastrophic. Was Katrina catastrophic? Seems like it was. And yet, not much actually happened. Is general population migration catastrophic? Is the wholesale change of a populations way of life catastrophic? To some, it is. Generally, it is to the people affected by it.
The warming is caused by human activity, if not entirely, then mostly.
Sort of. I'd put it as "human activity has a significant impact on warming".
Right now, I'm looking at two largely correct corollaries, one irrelevant one, one that depends on where you are located, and one that is somewhat misleading. There's plenty of evidence for corollary one, models that predict the third one, regions that demonstrate the impact of localized changes in precipitation for the fourth one, and plenty of evidence for the fifth one.
Now to your questions.
What is the optimum temperature (or range) of the Earth?
The question is wrong, because as is it has no answer. The earth has no optimum temperature (unless you count the one that allows for rock to stabilize and not become an ionized plasma). What you want to know is what the optimum temperature range is for human habitation. As you can see by the current population distribution, it is quite wide, which could lead to the assumption that the optimum temperature range for human habitation is just as wide. That's incorrect. If you drop an Inuit into the Brazilian jungle, a Massai into the Midwest, or a Midwestern farmer into the Alps, they will die very quickly. See for example the pilgrims who first arrived in North America: they nearly died from starvation, even though the temperatures weren't that much different from what they were used to.
As a result, the answer to that question is: exactly the one that you have right now around you. Civilizations have adapted to work in their current environment. Change that only a bit, and the impact on the people can be devastating.
When has it been at that temperature in the past?
See above for why this question doesn't give you a useful answer.
Has it ever been outside that temperature in the past?
Most decidedly. However, you don't want to go through the change again.
How, specifically, do we know this?
Historical records of both temperatures (inferred and directly recorded), and of historical records that chronicle the result of dramatic temperature changes.
In particular, how does one define the temperature of the Earth, and how does then measure that?
It's a good question. In general, it is understood to be the yearly average of multiple points across the globe, preferably along all latitudes and longitudes. But yes, temperature measurements are difficult, and it requires a lot of work to make sure that datasets from one source can be used for comparison with other data sets.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
There is no such thing as AGWs. "Global Warming" has now become "Climate Change".
It did, for the same reason why Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging became simply Magnetic Resonance Imaging: the gullibility of a common man.
Apparently, there are still too many idiots unable to comprehend the concept of averaging temperatures across the globe, so as soon as they see one place that didn't warm up for one year, they get confused by the "warming" bit in "global warming", and decry it all as a conspiracy theory by a socialist world government.
Still, it's just a name change for the sake of PR. Global average temperature keeps going up - the planet is warming.
And you can than the previous administration for that. On Frank Luntz's recommendation, they started using the phrase "Climate Change" instead of "Global Warming" to make it sound less frightening.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
You want some AGW data? Here's an aggregate of a bunch of different universities' measurements. I look forward to your analysis of it.
Oh, do you want Michael Mann's (the hockey stick guy) data specifically? Here's the data behind one of his most recent papers. Note that he's included his Matlab code.
The whole "show us the data" thing was kind of an issue before, but now there's just no excuse. I bet you still don't know what to do with it, even now that you have it. I sure don't.
I think the specific thing you are referring to is the publication of the Soon and Baliunas paper in Climate Research in 2003. It was a paper that should not have been published without major revisions. Among the criticisms of the paper they used precipitation proxies where they should have used temperature proxies and they took regional temperature changes as global changes. Half of the editorial staff resigned when the publisher wouldn't allow the chief editor to print a rebuttal of the paper. Even the publisher eventually admitted it should not have been published without revision. Like the editorial staff Phil Jones questioned why anyone would want to have their name associated with a journal that would publish such junk. Maybe that's why the journal went downhill.
The majority of sources cited in AR4 were peer reviewed (12900/18500 according to one {skeptic} source). The IPCC AR4 report has 3 sections.
Working Group I is about the physical science basis of climate change. I believe you'll find that nearly everything cited in the WG1 section is peer reviewed and anything that wasn't probably could have been.
WG II is about the impacts and our vulnerability to climate change. There are more non-peer reviewed references in this section but I'd be surprised if the peer reviewed cites didn't outnumber them still.
WG III is about mitigation, what we can do about it. By its very nature it has some political aspects to it and cited many government, NGO, and business sources as well as peer reviewed papers. This is where you will find most of the non-peer reviewed cites in the AR4 report.
Finally, a paper is not necessarily worthless just because it is not peer reviewed. I think you have to examine it on a case by case basis to determine its worth.